Drum scanning, any good books or websites:

[mortensen]

... I'd like to join the conversation, Ed and Adam.
I picked up a Scanmate4000 last fall, I haven't had much time to go deeply into it, but my DIY mounting station seems ok... I'll upload some photos in this thread soon:
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...scanner-anyone

I have had plenty of good advice from Andrea Gazzoni (forum member, running a 5000 in italy), including precise measures of the original mounting station. Ed, you are lucky to have one! It's difficult to achieve proper alignment and built quality when you do it yourself.

A question: how do you set apertures and 'check' apertures in CQ? I can only find aperture setting in the preview menu, but I cannot assess the aperture chosen, i.e. how do I see a 100% crop of my preview in 4000dpi to check the graininess/blurriness of the aperture?

best,
lars

[Adam Long]

Hi Lars, thanks for the input.

Be keen to see some pictures of your mounting station, I've started the process of building one. Is it pretty close to the specs on your drawings on the other thread?

Apertures are set under the options for sharpening - you can download the full manual from ABC scan, the info is on pages 194-5, including making a small hi-res preview for checking sharpness. Unfortunately there isn't much info on the aperture settings - in the dropdown window they are just numbered 1-4 with no indication of which is biggest, smallest or actual sizes.

Have you played around with the output settings much?

Adam

[Adam Long]

Hi Lars, thanks for the input.

Be keen to see some pictures of your mounting station, I've started the process of building one. Is it pretty close to the specs on your drawings on the other thread?

Apertures are set under the options for sharpening - you can download the full manual from ABC scan, the info is on pages 194-5, including making a small hi-res preview for checking sharpness. Unfortunately there isn't much info on the aperture settings - in the dropdown window they are just numbered 1-4 with no indication of which is biggest, smallest or actual sizes.

Have you played around with the output settings much?

Adam

[cdavis324]

Hi Adam,

Before I broke my 11k, I would scan make raw scans of color negs in 8bit LAB, then in ps convert to 16 bit, then RGB, then de-noise to interpolate the data, and finally invert in Color Perfect. It's quite a weird workflow, and a bit counter intuitive, but I got beautiful files by doing it this way. I did some tests against 16bit RGB scans, and surprisingly the 8bit LAB won by a large margin - even with dense negs that are very compressed on the histogram.

In terms of aperture, I would scan 4x5 at 3200dpi on auto or 2. I've found that software noise reduction(as opposed to physically oversampling by selecting an aperture too large for the resolution) looks best - the images are bitingly sharp, while the grain is reduced afterwards via software. It seems to me that's what CastorScans is doing with their incredibly detailed, smooth 35mm scans on flickr.

Chris

[Ed Bray]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for adding to the discussion.

At the moment I am having difficulty with 5x7 scans using the 11000, I cannot seem to get the settings correct. I don't suppose you would have a screenshot of your settings for 4x5?

[Adam Long]

Good knowledge Chris, that chimes with my own tests on 8 bit LAB vs 16bit RGB.

Ed, just a thought but you might be running into as file size issue? I thinks its limited to ~2GB, which means for 5x7 you might be limited to <2000dpi to scan in a single pass. The alternative is to scan two overlapping crops separately, and combine later.

[Ed Bray]

Thanks for the suggestion Adam, even at small file sizes it is not liking it.

[cdavis324]

Ed,
I don't have a screenshot of my settings. My scanner is sitting in its crate waiting to be fixed... Can you describe the problem you're having? Keep in mind that you make aperture and auto/manual focus setting prior to making the preview scan. I assume you're using cq? I used cq 4 in os9, as I was unable to ever get the computer to see t he scanner in os10.

[Ed Bray]

I'm a bit screwed at the moment, I bought a later model G4 which had more memory and twin faster processors, I thought I would stick the drive and SCSI card from the older model into the newer one and be good to go, well that was a mistake, it wouldn't see the scanner at all, so I decided to change it back, and now it won't let me back into OS-X. What's worse is that neither of the Power Macs came with any operating system disks so I have had to order a set of OS9 and OS-X Tiger ones from ebay. I'll do it all properly then and see what's what.

[cdavis324]

Good luck. The clean install may fix your problem, but if it doesn't try installing the scsi driver for your card. There's a list of cards on the yahoo forum that should work in osX...